


Safety

by LittlestFinch



Series: Bits and Pieces [1]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: But real people have them I hear so I'm trying to emulate them, Emotions, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, i hate them, some blood, this is fluffy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-24 22:43:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13821003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittlestFinch/pseuds/LittlestFinch
Summary: Reyes and Mac have feelings. Based off some of the game interaction.





	Safety

**Author's Note:**

> Hello. I am learning to write fluff.
> 
> More seriously I'm learning to expose characters as vulnerable and with dimensions. Working against the hard time I have with allowing men to be vulnerable, that's on me. Trying to be better and kinder. Let boys have feelings too.

“Deep breaths, Reyes, deep breaths.” He was trying to hide the concern as he dug through the dirt stained canvas bag. It had too many pockets, too many places for things to hide. “You’re gonna be just fine.” His attempt to be comforting. It was the same voice he used for Duncan on endless, lonely nights. 

“Front,” deep breath “pocket,” deep breath, “Mac.” It took way too long to get the words out. She could could taste the rust and salt of blood rising up the back of her throat. It pushed and pressed and threatened like bile. A foul taste promising to escape. Was she bleeding into her lungs?

The third bullet had entered between the smallest of her ribs, perhaps it had nicked her right lung. It was impossible to pinpoint the starting orientation of the pain that wracked her like waves washing over a beach. Each breath agony. In. Pause. Out. Pause. The gurgle that had begun to rumble at the ends of her inhales, this made her worry. She tried to talk herself down. _You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. We have a stimpak, they fix everything. You’ll be fine._ She didn’t believe herself, not truly. She tried to believe him. 

His reassurances were spilling out of his lips with a forced calm, but MacCready was still digging. The fucking bag had at least ten pockets, that’s why she had salvaged it. Except she had no way to help him find the right ‘front pocket’. She couldn’t spare the air to explain the zipper, she felt the growing helplessness as she watched him. It was easy to sense his growing panic, despite his reassurances, despite the words that were uttered with the desperation of a prayer. He knew how to do this, in a way that she envied really, how to stay calm when desperation was clawing at her. She wished she had told him that, maybe she would never be able to.

She knew he could hear it, the death rattle. Yes, they had to have hit her lung. She was going to drown in her own fluids. What an unpleasant way to go. She couldn’t spare the air to make words, to tell him it was okay. Instead her mouth hung open, to allow blood and spit and bile to drip from the back of her throat and out. To pool in her lap, she couldn’t feel it’s heat. Her pants were already stained and starting to harden with blood from the second bullet that had struck her in the meat of her thigh. Just a flesh wound, she had told him. Xochil had always had a knack for speaking too soon. 

She saw his fear when he turned his head to check on her. She could see it in the rapid contraction of dark pupils. The shake of his normally steady hands. “You keep fucking breathing.” He was dumping the contents of the bag onto the dried grass, all regard for her property gone. 

Pain was making it hard to focus, but she had to force herself to look at something. She studied the back of his head, the hat she jokingly hated, the way his hair curled up from beneath it as if trying to escape. The corner of a sharp jawline. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and patchy stubble grew there now. She wanted to reach out and touch the spray of sharp hairs, reassure him, reassure herself. Now black dots swam in the corners of her vision threatening to engulf her in darkness. A strange, distant, ringing had begun in her ears that slowly began to climb in volume as if racing towards some unknown crescendo. 

Xochil suddenly realized she could no longer feel her limbs. One hand clumsily held a blood soaked scarf to her chest, the other laid limp in the dirt next to her. Attempting to curl either resulted in weak twitching. A spider’s death throes mimicked in limbs. The first bullet had hit her in the arm, she had been shot in the arm before. Her normally dark skin seemed paperwhite now. All the scars that normally lived there invisible within this new palette. She marvelled at the dark lines of blood drying on her bare arms creating macabre trails across her flesh. She was coated in so much blood, her blood, his blood, their blood. It was impossible to tell. It couldn’t all be hers right? Some of it had dried enough that it had begun to crack and crumble away from her like old paint. 

_It was worth it._ This is what she told herself. _I am good people._ A reassurance bouncing about a pain shattered skull. It felt like days ago that they had found the ghoul child by the side of the road, locked inside the carcass of an old refrigerator. It had been hours. Only a few hours ago she was alive and breathing air without the terrifying gurgle that took further hold with each stuttered breath. The child was with his family now. He had been reunited with parents, similarly eternal, a beastly family portrait. Yet she had been so jealous. She knew MacCready had felt the same way, she had read it across the familiar angles of his features.

The Gunner’s interest in the child had been a surprise, as had the small army they had brought to retrieve him. The shootout had destroyed half the old neighborhood. He was safe now though. The family had escaped while herself and MacCready had covered. Now, she would have a warrior’s death, she consoled herself silently. She went down with a fight and took with her a handful of soulless mercenaries. She was more at peace about it now than she had been the last time she’d been on death’s doorstep. Neither time did her life cross before her eyes. She’d laugh if she could. This time she wasn’t alone at least.

Turning weary, heavy lidded, eyes back on MacCready she realized he had found the stimpak. She also realized that she couldn’t hear it if he was still speaking to her, only the ringing in her ears was audible now. She couldn’t feel the needle of the stim, nor could she feel the familiar roughness of Mac’s hands as he gripped her chin in an attempt to tug her back from the brink. His mouth was forming words, but now even the ringing had been replaced by a thick blanket of silence. A smothering comforter of painless blackness that beckoned so sweetly to her. She allowed it to take over, wordlessly sinking into the black abyss as if she had been swallowed. 

In the waking world MacCready was swearing, loudly, viciously. Words that felt at once foreign and familiar in his mouth. He wouldn’t know yet, couldn’t know yet if he was too late. She was slumped against the wall now, chin tucked to her chest, outside the abandoned house. Her blood was staining the earth beneath her, a grim puddle. It couldn’t all be hers, could it? He pulled back her blood drenched hand, and the scarf beneath it where coagulated sanguine was still slick and damp. The wound had closed, the stimpak had woven the flesh back together. 

He waited, for what could have been hours. For long silent moments where he realized he was holding his own breath. He waited until he couldn’t hear the rattle anymore, until her breathing evened out. Until the gurgle had cleared, until the blood stopped dripping from half open lips. Out of the woods, at least for the moment. 

Three bullets it had taken to bring her down. The first through her arm, the second through her leg, the third had hit her at the base of her ribs. Too close to vital things. He knew the third was still inside her, caught in a rib maybe, but it hadn’t exited. It didn’t matter. He was just as full of old metal. Two sides of the same coin. 

She was a far cry from the frightened rabbit he’d first met only three months ago outside of Vault 111. He had watched her harden, like earth drying under the sun. Yet just as dried earth, beneath was a softness that refused to fade. Xochil Reyes was his boss, his partner, his friend. Certainly his best friend in the Commonwealth. Rough padded fingers pressed to the soft curve of her neck revealed a pulse, weak but consistent. 

He had to attend to his own wounds now, so he could move her somewhere out of the open. The Gunners would be looking for their missing platoon. The area would soon be swarming like bloat flies on a corpse.

—

When Xochil woke up it was with surprise. Was this heaven? Dust motes in sunbeams, her eyes followed them to their source, a broken window in a paint chipped frame. No, certainly not heaven. She was in a strange bed, in a strange room, in a strange house. Seemed to be a running trend in her life these days. A quick sweep of the room and she spotted the spray paint, the marks telling her this was a Railroad Safehouse. 

Attempting to shift herself revealed to her she was still in a great deal of pain. She was also met with resistance. Confused she shifted to find MacCready sound asleep in the bed next to her. He was half propped against a crumbling headboard, his hat pulled low to keep the sun from his eyes. He had shed his lopsided trench and the flannel he’d been wearing beneath that, leaving him in a messy blood stained wife beater. She wondered how long they had been like this, almost peaceful. Amusing that this is what it took to get them to both to sleep at the same time.

She studied him a moment, she hadn’t realized he was injured also. She could see the flesh of his shoulder, she knew his stitches by now. She felt strangely guilty. They had only had one stimpak left, it was obvious who received it. It was always her. Her eyes travelled to the even rise and fall of his chest. Like herself he was decorated with scars. Damaged goods both of them. 

“That’s a mighty impressive farmer’s tan you’ve got going, Mac.” She croaked through a dry throat. She’d die for some water, kill for some whiskey. He didn’t answer immediately, but she knew she had woken him. She had caught the hitch in his breath, the flex of his arms that lay crossed against his chest. 

“I thought you were going to die, Reyes.” There was relief there, hidden beneath a voice as cracked as her own. “You’ve been out for almost two days. You scared the hell out of me.” His voice was something like accusatory. It wasn’t angry, but it was edged by something she hadn’t heard before from him. 

“Oh come on, MacCready, we’ve been in worse scrapes than this.” Xochil was surprised by the sudden sincerity. The events were now blurry to her, but she remembered now how close to the brink she’d actually been. 

“You can’t just die on me, _Xochil_.” His voice was rough, her name said with a plea. The name he rarely used. 

Xochil shifted so she was staring up at him, her body aching in protest. He hadn’t moved. His arms were crossed and his hat tipped low so she was unable to see his eyes in its shadow. She could still read the worry in the lines of his face, the tightness of his lips. She huffed in pain as she reached up at him, batting at his arm with a hand still mottled with dried blood. 

“Hey, Robert.” She gently teased him with the name that felt strange on her lips. “I’m fine. It’s fine. We’re fine.” She prodded at him until he raised his arm and wiped the back of his hand across his face. 

“It was hard enough after Lucy died.” He sniffed. “I know I might seem like an ass h-like a jerk, but I can’t stand the thought of being out here alone again.” He wiped his face again, eyes still hidden behind his hat. 

Xochil stopped her teasing and pushed herself to a sit. Her ribs ached something fierce but she sat herself facing him on folded knees. Adjusting her weight off her thigh where a bullet hole that seemed days old was visible in the center of a flower bloom bruise. As she was fidgeting he pulled off his hat to look at her through bleary eyes. He looked tired. More tired than usual, worn and thin. Both of them were worn and thin like old fabric.

“Mac, I’m not going anywhere.” She set a scarred, dirty hand above his knee and gently squeezed. A small reassurance. A physical connection that perhaps she needed just as badly. 

“You’re just-“ Mac started and stopped himself fiddling with the hat now in his lap. “I just haven’t had someone like you in my life in a long time. Someone to watch my back. Someone who genuinely cares what happens to me.” His eyes were cast down as he spoke, focused on the blood caked hand that still rested on his leg. 

Her own head was bowed now as she fought back the tumultuous mess of emotion that he had triggered in her. Not only the relief at being alive, but the overwhelming relief in the realization that someone cared if she was alive. She had worried about it on more than one sleepless night. Dying in the wastes and joining an army of skeletal remains abandoned in their final resting places anywhere from ditches to old couches. Now at least she knew someone would miss her should she join the graveless masses. It filled her with some bizarre sense of comfort that washed over her and forced cathartic tears through tightly closed eyelids.

“Now look what you’ve gone and done.” She was sniffing now too. Wiping tears and leaving dirty smudges across her bruised features. “I’m just glad you found me, Mac, and I think I got a pretty good deal for a hired gun.” She didn’t like being vulnerable. Not like this. Yet here they were.

“I’ll say,” Mac’s familiar grin was back on his features, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “There were only seventy-two caps on those raiders I pulled off you that day.” It was likely surprising to both of them when their laughter chorused from this. The kind of ragged laughter born of relief and release. Laughter that brought tears and catharsis and endorphins. It took too long for them to regain their composure. Xochil’s laughter ragged from the pain. 

“Alright, alright, Reyes.” He ran fingers through scruffy hair. “You get some more sleep so we can head to the Castle. I’m still worried there might be Gunners out there trying to figure out who cost them a whole platoon.”

Xochil did not protest his plan. Until he started to push himself fully upright in the bed. Making to leave. “Where are you going?” It slipped out before she had even realized it. 

“Couch?” He pointed to the half decayed pile of fabric and springs and tetanus. 

“J-Just stay here.” She was already laying down again, weariness as heavy as a blanket. She’d need to remember to pack Med-x next time, needles be damned. MacCready didn’t answer, but settled. She scooted close so her back was against him, an anchor. A reminder she wasn’t alone. His warmth was radiant despite their layers.


End file.
